Recent Articles

French hard drive maker LaCie has held its hands up to a year-long credit card breach.

Consumers who bought technology from its ‪LaCie.com ‬site between 27 March 2013 and 10 March 2014 may have had their credit cards exposed in the process, the firm admitted in a breach advisory.

The problem was NOT detected internally and only came to light after US law enforcement broke the news to ‪LaCie‬ that its site had sprung a hole. ‪LaCie‬ has stopped taking online orders and switched payment processing set-ups while it goes through the process of sorting out the resulting mess.

On March 19, 2014, the FBI informed LaCie that it found indications that an unauthorized person used malware to gain access to information from customer transactions that were made through LaCie’s website. We have hired a leading forensic investigation firm, who is conducting a thorough investigation, and assisting us in implementing additional security measures.

As a precaution, we have temporarily disabled the e-commerce portion of the LaCie website while we transition to a provider that specializes in secure payment processing services. We will resume accepting online orders once we have completed the transition.

Based on the investigation, we believe that transactions made between March 27, 2013 and March 10, 2014 were affected. The information that may have been accessed by the unauthorized person may include customers’ names, addresses, email addresses, and payment card numbers and card expiration dates. Customers’ LaCie website user names and passwords could also have been accessed, which is why we required a reset of all passwords.

The breach at the Seagate-owned firm was first reported by investigative journalist Brian Krebs last month. "The Web storefront for French hardware giant LaCie… had been compromised by a group of hackers that broke into dozens of online stores using security vulnerabilities in Adobe’s ColdFusion software," Krebs reports.

ColdFusion flaws have been tied to a large number of high-profile breaches over the last year or so – including a breach tied to the theft of source code and Adobe itself and a break-in targeting data brokers including research and biz solutions firm LexisNexis.

LaCie - which advertises itself as the best choice for your data’s safety and security - has become an example of data insecurity. Questions are already being asked about what security protections it had in place prior to the breach. It's not clear how many records or credit cards were exposed as a result of the breach at LaCie.

"It’s unclear at this time just how many LaCie customers may have been exposed, but it would seem sensible for anyone who has bought a product from the firm in the last year to keep a close eye on their credit card bills and be on the lookout for unusual transactions," said veteran security expert Graham Cluley in a blog post. ®